PhotriusPyrelus

First, this is in discussions and not suggestions for a reason (of course, if the moderators feel differently, that's their prerogative). I'm not saying anything should change, I may prefer it, but that's not my intent in making the thread. While I would personally like to see durability as an 'industry standard' mechanic die a fiery death in the magma chambers of Kīlauea (along with RNG Critical Hits), I realize that's a pipe-dream, and the developers here have deliberate reasons to include it; at least I hope they do and they're not just doing it because that's what MineCraft did. So... what are those reasons? I'm genuinely curious, because I don't understand it, and I would like to. And let's nip the 'realism' argument in the bud right here; I'm not terribly interested in it, but if you were going to say that consider this: real tools last for years (decades, even) - even with consistent use - if you're not leaving them out in the elements to rust and rot. What I am interested in are game-design arguments. What does it add to the game? On my view, it's just an additional resource tax on...anything the tool is used to do. If I take a copper pick and hammer and I mine 300 regular nuggets of copper, I didn't actually make 1500 units of copper, I made 1340, because the pick cost 100 mining them, and the hammer lost 60% of its durability crushing the raw ore - that's an 10.6r% loss! So why not just reduce the amount of copper gained, since that's the ultimate effect? (and for the record, I have the same issue with durability in MMOs; it's just a tax, so reduce gold drops and avoid the tedium of visiting the repair NPC; and if you need a 'death penalty', deduct gold straight from the character's wallet or bank, like Diablo 2 did) I'm very interested to hear from people who like the system on why exactly it is they like it, what it adds to their experience. I completely understand the dopamine we get from crafting that very first tool. It's such a satisfying experience to get that last nugget of copper go to your crucible, smelt, cast, wait (not so fun but meh), and then stick it on the end of a...well...stick. I can see finally making that first bronze, then iron, then steel one being similarly rewarding. What I don't understand is how it is rewarding to have to regularly craft replacements. When tools are liberated from a durability system, it makes losing them to a bad death that much more painful. Instead of "Meh, it was half-destroyed anyway" it's "Aw man, that was my lucky prospecting pick, now I gotta make another one." It opens the door for more meaningful modifications or enhancements in the future, too, like MineCraft's enchanting. I was extremely selective with enchanting before Mending was added because what was the point? It was going to break and I'd have to do it all over again. I want to be clear that I'm only talking about tools (and weapons), not armour. Armour's whole purpose is to protect the wearer from injury by absorbing the punishment itself... though, I'd still rather see something a little more interesting than a magical durability bar that completely destroys the item when it's exhausted, but that's straying dangerously close to suggestion talk. Now that I think about it, I'm not 100% sure how clothes lose condition in the game. If they only get damaged when you're attacked, that's reasonable, but if they wear out in a matter of weeks of normal wear, well that's just silly, too. As I write this, I'm wearing a t-shirt I've had for...probably 25 years. ...I feel so old. ;_;

One of my waking-up ideas today was how neat it would be to have a map type - kind of like Don't Starve: Shipwrecked - where there mostly water and you used a ship to travel between the islands. Large islands would be common (and you'd have to start on one to get the resources to build the ship). And when I say ship, I mean ship, not dinky little boat like MineCraft has. Best if there would be wind vectors and cool sailing mechanics, but not totally necessary and might be too complicated for the engine, who knows. EDIT: This would work best with a class ("Sea Dog" would be my suggestion for name) who couldn't actually do agriculture (farming and animal-husbandry), so you'd have an impetus to keep moving from island to island for food. If seasons are based on latitude, you could avoid winter by going the other hemisphere.

Why's that? I don't follow the logic?

I'm pretty new; I have not messed with Pumpkin's yet. I do agree that the choice between seeds and food is nonsensical from an IRL perspective, but it is at least understandable from a gameplay perspective; it's offering the player a choice (whether or not it's a meaningful choice is debatable) on how to use his resources. Like the "choice" of how to use your first 40 copper: do you get a pick and a hammer, so you can get more metal? Or do you get a pick and a prospecting pick - like my dumb-butt did my first game that got to smelting - so you can find more ore, but you can't crush it into a smeltable form? Also, as far as seed scarcity goes, do you know how many seeds an actual tree drops? HUNDREDS! But it's such a complete pain to get seeds from trees. And why the crap does punching leaves give more seeds/sticks than just chopping down the tree? Ugh. But that's a topic for another thread... You touch on a very important part of game design, something that totally drove me away from Chore-Simulator 2017 (a.k.a. ARK: Survival Evolved) a few years ago. Most people want fun from games, not chores. I realized I was logging in every day, not to enjoy the game, but to do chores just to maintain stuff. That's not fun, that's a job. I hope Vintage Story can strike a much better balance; a little bit of maintenance can be fun. Too much isn't just not-fun, it's anti-fun. I'm not sure how you do that, though: make food an omni-present concern without making it so tedious or time-consuming that you can't do anything else but subsist. If food is too easy, like MineCraft, why even have it at all? If it's as simple to solve as: "punch some trees, make some hoes, break some grass to get seeds, plant seeds to get wheat, live on bread forever" (or "find village, live on potatos/beets/carrots/wheat forever"), why even have it in the game?! The other end of the spectrum isn't really fun either, though; never having enough food if you don't dedicate so much time to it, you don't get to enjoy other parts of the game. One approach might be to make the point less about subsistence, and more about thriving. That is, eating to live would be relatively easy, but *thriving* would be more difficult, probably most easily accomplished with a more developed cooking system where good dishes/meals which are more involved to create gives not just satiation, but desirable buffs. But something like an advanced nutrition system where it builds over time so you have to maintain it, not just turning food into effectively potions like Stardew Valley does. I have not played on a multiplayer server for this game, but I did play on an ECO server for a while where time marches on even if no one's online. Though crops required (at least when I played, which was some time ago) little attention and tending. I can't imagine an outdoor (I have not messed with Greenhouses yet, not sure how they work) farming being successful on a multiplayer server where rabbits come eat your crops, or the crops dry out while you're offline. I've enjoyed farming in video games since the first Harvest Moon I played. The question should always be: what's fun about farming? And I think the Harvest Moon style gets it mostly bang on: once you get everything tilled (and if not for tool durability, I'd confidently say tilling should need to be done more than once) and fenced and planted, you want to wake up, tend your crops, then forget about them, at least until you go to bed, but probably until the next morning. As I mentioned in my last post, I really enjoyed Sakuna, but my rice farm always felt just a little too oppressive. It felt like it needed *constant* attention, if I went off to do a level, I'd come back to something needing to have been solved sooner (usually weeds, sometimes water). But it is very important, I think, to have some kind of crop-tending, otherwise you end up with MineCraft's "Oh, I'm out of food, better go harvest my MEGA FARM, that I ignore until just this situation!".

While I tend to agree, bear in mind, that 1 "seed" isn't really a single actual seed. It's seeds enough to sow approximately one square meter of farmland. See, video games - or games in general really - do a *lot* of abstraction. what you see as a representation isn't necessarily exactly what is represented. One square meter of, say, rice, is well more than a handful of grains. The average yield of a hectare is 3-6 tonnes. A hectare is 10,000 m^2, a tonne is 1,000 kg. That means in one m^2, you get 0.3 kg of dried rice. So 0.3 kg is about 1.68 cups of rice, which, when rehydrated would approximately double to 3.36 cups. So we actually end up getting more or less the right amount, don't we? Two game-units of rice cook up to one serving, so as long as you're getting an average of about 4 game-units of rice, that's pretty accurate. I can't be bothered to go through this for every kind of produce, but rice at least seems to be pretty "realistic". Except for the fact that we don't have to dry it. Or hull it. Or cook it with water. Or sort the seeds. Or grow the seeds into seedlings. Or till the ground. Then plant the seedlings. Then submerge them in just enough water. Then drain the water for a time. Then add the water back. Why yes, I did enjoy Sakuna: of Rice and Ruin, how could you tell? @_@ If there's something to look at, perhaps it's the satiation you gain from one game-unit of the different foods. :shrug:

Let me first say that I really like the crafting mechanics in the game. Napping, clay-forming, smything, they're all neat little mini games that I've been looking for in 'crafting' games. That said, the smything one seems a little...tedious (Clay would probably actually be worse, but the "duplicate layer function" is amazing and clearly shows you have an interest in keeping players from being too bored). Smything also burns through hammers like crazy (honestly, tool durability in pretty much all games with it has always seemed silly to me. Have you ever used a real shovel? As long as you don't leave them in the weather to rust and rot, they last decades, even with regular use). It takes me around a fifth of a copper hammer just to make a single plate! I know I'm not doing the optimal moves, but that still seems really excessive to me. I think a simple 'fix' to both 'problems', would be to have a new tool; I want to be explicit here, this is a second tool you would use in concert with the regular hammer, because intricate stuff like the sawblade would still need the precision of a regular hammer. Call it "Smything Hammer", or some such. What it would do is, instead of just moving voxels by one space, it would move them linearly down to the next level or the next voxel on the rank or file. I suggest a new tool instead of added functionaltiy to the regular hammer because that would double or nearly double the options in the "F" menu, making it somewhat cluttered. Consider the image: The orange indicates it is a level above the red/brown. The green squares are empty. Let us call the lower left most green square (1,1,0), 0 because it is empty. The left-most single voxel would then be (1,5,1), the left orange voxel would be (3,5,2), and so on. Suppose we want to move the (3,5,2) voxel in the positive-Y direction to be on the (*,*,1) plane. With a regular hammer, that would take 3 strikes. With my suggested "Smything Hammer" (or whatever), you would hit it "up" once, and it would go to (3,8,1). If you hit it to the right, though, it would stop at (6,5,2), because the voxel at (7,5,2) would block it. Not quite sure how it would work with an analogous "Heavy Hit" move (if it should even have such). ...partly because I'm not 100% sure how heavy hit even works. For example, consider the image. I put an ingot on the anvil and I hit the (3,5,2) voxel (indicated with a blue marker). It pushes the top and bottom three adjacent voxels up and down respectively. Since the four corner voxels fall down, they don't complete the diagonal. Makes sense. I hit the (7,5,2) voxel. The top works just like we expect from the first hit, but for some reason, the (8,4,2) voxel goes to (9,4,1) instead of the expected (8,3,1). I do not understand why this happens, and in general, Heavy Hit seems very unpredictable in other less-controlled experiments, but this one I have repeated several times with several different positions; one side always behaves as expected, the other side does not.

Well, that explains it. I must fat-finger it when I mean to hit "M" for my map.

I somehow keep turning off the 'tips' that tell me what combination of LMB, RMB, Shift, or Control do what functions. How am I doing this, so I can turn it back on. @_@

OMG! I WAS GOING TO MAKE A POST ABOUT THIS YESTERDAY! It was such a surprise!

While I don't disagree with everything you said... Maybe that's exactly what they want to find out? After all, the average forum denizen isn't a game designer, the developers - presumably - are. Seems to me they'd be better-equipped to figure out what should change. Also the opinions on what to change would probably be as unique to a poster as his fingerprints. That doesn't make for very useful feedback: 100 people saying 100 different things. And how much of that feedback would like completely outside their vision of the game? Polls aren't good at finding solutions. Polls are good at finding problems. Almost two-thirds of people favour Hunter or Commoner. 75% of people think the Hunter or Commoner is mechanically the best. That alone, actually does say a lot about what should change, but again, it's not really finding a solution, it's finding a problem: most of the classes have too many penalties. I've been thinking about it a bit lately, and I'm not sure penalties even need to exist. If the bonuses are strong or unique enough, the 'penalty' for choosing Class A is *not* having the bonus of Class B. That's what economists would call "opportunity cost". But what do I know? Maybe penalties are very important to the devs. So that "feedback" might be rather useless. Feedback is a tricky issue. It's a fine line to walk, because games designed by committee suck, but so do games whose developers don't listen to their players. :shrug:

That's so freakin' cool. I thought that was happening, but I wasn't sure.

Small correction for you: it's 20% now. I equip a torch on my commoner, and my hunger rate goes from 100% to 120%.

It would be really nice if waypoints would (or optionally could) auto-fill colour and icon if I already have an existing waypoint of the same name. For example, I like to mark every cave with a sheer drop as "Pit" with red colour and the ladder-in-a-hole icon, so if I'm running for my life, I know to be careful in those areas. It would save me so much tedium if, when I type "Pit" in the name field, the colour is automatically set to red and the icon to the ladder-in-a-hole, press Enter to leave the name field and Enter again to close the waypoint box. If you have multiple different way points of the same name - say you mark "Cave" with different colours indicating whether or not you've lit them up or something - it would default to either the colour/icon of the first or the most recent. Even at its worst - defaulting to things you want to change - it would be no worse than the present defaulting to a black dot. This could only improve the player experience. Further, having some keyboard commands to interact with the icon selection would also be a boon.

For the longest time, I assumed berry bushes weren't obtainable with only a fist. I think I discovered this was a misconception when I accidentally LMB'd a bush by accident. It was probably behind a leaf block I was breaking. They are a good traveling and early-game food source, but if you can't easily move the bushes, I don't see them being a terribly useful long-term food source. I think if they required a copper-or-better tool (I suggest shovel, makes the most sense to me: digging it up to replant it) to collect them. I think that would fix most of the problem with them. By the time you can move them, you should have better sources of food more readily available. Though TBPH, boars are a much better source of food. Easy to kite into deep water and murder while they're slower than you, give you lots of meat which is more satisfying and keeps for more than twice as long. It seems strange to me to echo an IRL crop schedule while having months that are - by default- not even a week-and-a-half long.

On some level, it makes sense. I mean, plants don't stay ripe forever, they die off and regrow. Though...usually for crop plants that takes a whole season, doesn't it? I don't know, I'm only a farmer in video games.

So I'm exploring around, and I find some bits of Borax (or copper, or gold, or any mineral) on the surface; if I dig in that general area, am I likely to find more Borax, or is it completely random?

Huh. Tangentially related... do mature crops disappear? I swear I had some mature speldt at a spot right next to my base but now it's gone. x_x I was trying to wait 'til everything was grown...

I had no idea. I saw the nutrition breakdown, but I didn't really know what it meant, and didn't realise it was diminished on death.

Yeah, I figure it was just me not noticing, but thought I'd ask. I swear some other game I played had crops that could very rarely spread. I think Eco, but I'm not sure. :shrug:

It could've just been my imagination, but I swear I found a patch of - I dunno, let's just say carrots - that spawned, and when I went back after several days, there were more of them than when I found it. Did I just not-notice them all the first time, or do they actually spread like that?

It seems like no matter how cold the firepit gets, if you have food in a cook pot, it never loses heat. I used one fire wood, got the pot up to 197 degrees and stayed there even after the fire went 'cold'. EDIT: Actually, it seems nothing does. Just tested the same thing when making torches. So not sure if this is a bug or not.

Get 4-5 stacks of clay. Spend a day forming all the clay stuff you're going to need: a bowl a cooking pot or two 12 crocks (enough to fill a storage vessel) two or three storage vessels pick, hammer, and anvil molds (and whatever other tools you think you'll when you first start working with metals). at least one crucible at least one ingot mold Fire them all at once, and do something else while they're cooking. I hardly even noticed how long it took this last world I started. Until I cooked up some food and realized I'd forgotten to make a bowl. XD EDIT: You may eventually need more, but I think that's a good starter list. You can make more as needed just be mindful and plan it out; e.g. if your storage vessels are starting to fill, make another *before* you need it, don't wait until you fill the last spot and then make another one.

So I found a bee's nest, but it's really high in a tree and looks like it might be completely surrounded by leaf blocks (also might be more than 7 blocks off the ground). I've left some skelps below it, and put 10ish flowers around, but it's been quite some time and the skelps are still empty. Does it just take a really long time, or is something perhaps mechanically wrong?

DISCLAIMER: I'm very new to the game. I've played quite a lot the past few days, but as far as progression my next goal is making a Copper Anvil. Lotsa Lead, not so much copper... So maybe something changes later. I think it's almost September in my game, and this has been on my mind as I'm staring down my first Winter with an empty cellar. --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- Much like in MineCraft, it really bothers me that for a "survival" game, survival doesn't really seem to be all that important, it's really only as meaningful as the player chooses to it to be. If I'm starving near my spawn point, why would I eat instead of just letting myself die and getting 50% satiation for 'free'? Through this lens, the importance of food preparation and preservation seem almost kind of superfluous. I understand you don't want the player to respawn starving because if you died a thousand blocks away, deep in a cave, you don't have time to go wolf down a meal and sprint to where you think you died and spend frantic minutes trying to find where exactly you died. But this does raise an issue that if you're just building around your spawn point, you get essentially free food forever. MineCraft almost kinda sorta solved this with its levels, having you irrecoverably lose a vast amount of the XP you've acquired if you die. Buuuuuuuut... you can make manifold variations of XP-farms which render that a non-issue. Also, that's a stick, and I prefer carrots; that is, I'd prefer a system which rewards survival rather than punishes death. I hate identifying problems without offering solutions, but I don't really have enough information what with not having a seat at the developer's table. Perhaps this has already been discussed to death. Perhaps this is deliberate to make the game easier for n00bs like me (if I hadn't restarted my world about 5 times, I'd probably be on my second Summer by now and in much the same place in terms of progression having starved-to-death umpteen times through my first Winter, as I'm probably going to do even in my current game if I don't restart). Perhaps the death penalty (or survival reward) system is planned but the design isn't finished yet (Enchanting in MineCraft wasn't added until the 1.0.0 launch version). It just seems so weird to me to have these deep food systems (which I love! It's a wonderful fusion of the simplicity of MineCraft and the @_@ complexity of Eco!), to have seasons that affect food abundance and scarcity but...none of it really seems to matter. To be clear, I'm *NOT* asking for hardcore. If I wanted to play Hardcore, I could just delete my worlds when I die. But I would like to see survival rewarded when it seems like you guys are trying to make the survival aspect of the game more interesting than MineCraft's "get seeds from grass, find water, make hoe, eat bread forever!". ...also...could you reduce the Wolf's attack damage a bit? Being two-shot is pretty lame, given they tend to live in extremely cluttered environments and your first 'warning' that there's even a wolf around is a bite on your butt. =(

I have only played Commoner. I have not played a whole lot, so I don't feel qualified to answer on the poll, but my n00by first impressions were mostly that a few % differences weren't going to make that big of an impact on the game, so why bother? The most-tempting were the Tailor and the Hunter because of the unique recipes, but I decided to pass on Hunter because I figured I'd be stuck in melee for a long time 'til I could make a bow, and I just didn't (don't) know how useful the clothing and clothing repair would be. I really like incomparables rather than just plain stat boost or reductions. Stuff like - and I'm not saying any of these are good ideas, just examples of what I mean - "this class can double-jump, but can't climb ladders", "all animals are friendly, but non-animals notice you from double the normal distance" I'm probably not explaining it well, and probably using the wrong terminology; I heard it in an Extra Creditz many years ago. The idea was instead of giving the player a choice between 10% more damage with X or 10% more damage with Y, or 10% more HP, it would be a choice between, say, double jump and no fall damage. Stuff that adds something new rather than just a marginal improvement on what you can already do. Which is why Tailor and Hunter appealed; they can make things no other class can make.